


"Here's your headline: 'Local robot says ooh.'"

by rebsy



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-17 09:08:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16513424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebsy/pseuds/rebsy





	"Here's your headline: 'Local robot says ooh.'"

It was a warm and lazy afternoon, and Piper was sweating. Not because of the Boston heat—she was _used_ to that. She was sweating because Curie was disassembling a mini-nuke on the table in front of her, and she did _not_ inspire confidence. 

“ _Ooh!_ Iz it the red wire, or the _blue_ wire?"  


Breaking News: Useless Robot Wipes out Best Hope for Mankind! Except she wouldn’t be _writing_ that, obviously, on account of being dead. _Vaporised_ , even. A shadow on the wall, assuming the wall survived, which she doubted. She’d seen mini-nukes _used_ before, and she’d been horrified at their power. Blue—ever the infuriatingly smug and cocky relic—had noted that they were pretty common during the War, and that they were hardly _that_ bad, compared to some of the _other_ weapons she ’d seen. 

And true to form, Blue stretched lazily, leaning back in the cushy chair like she didn’t have a care in the world, entirely unconcerned that an incompetent robot was going to get them all killed. “The _red_ wire, Curie.” 

And Piper cringed at the _snip_ of the wire-cutters. Nothing happened, apart from her blood pressure spiking. Curie beamed, delighted at her success. 

_ Why _ did _Curie,_ of all people, need to know how to disassemble a mini-nuke? 

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She’d never quite seen anybody with fingers quite _like_ Curie. Over the years, she’d had the fortune to work alongside a number of talented surgeons and scientists of all stripes, and they’d had the fortune to work on _her_. Many had been world-class, the very best talent the United States DIA could procure; and yet, Curie outshone them all. Inhuman robotic precision had been mated to the sensitivity of human flesh, and the combination was _stunning_. 

There was something lacking, though, and that something was _balance_. Curie was delightfully naive, in a lot of ways; perpetually disappointed at the incivility and violence of the world above. She abhorred combat and she was the _epitome_ of a bleeding heart, always begging Blue to do ze right thing and _blah blah blah_. And yet, when it came time for triage—or when she asked her for advice about chemical weapon aerosol effectiveness or biological weapon spread and vector optimisation—she was as cold as ice, utterly focused on her task, regardless of the moral horror. One day, Curie had pestered her about what _she_ knew about pre-war biological warfare, as she sat next to her, curled up in a chair like some delightful, French-speaking _chat,_ her chin on the armrest of the chair as she sipped at her _limonade_. She knew a great deal— _more_ than a great deal, even, since Curie had proclaimed her _la savante—_ and she’d told Curie about Limit-115 and Davis-1025 and Mordicana-22 and all of the other bioweapons she’d seen, both deployed on the battlefields of that long-ago war, and locked in the the old labs. She’d taken samples of all of them, at one point or another, and she still knew where she’d hidden those samples so many years ago, and Curie had extracted from her a promise to share them, at some point. Curie wanted to conduct _science_ , and to see how potent they still were, and how they compared with the weaponised viruses _she_ was familiar with. Curie had promised to be patient, though, for she was cognisant of the fact that it might be _un peu difficile_ to find the machines she’d need to conduct X-ray crystallography in a distressingly uncivilised post-apocalyptic wasteland. 

And so, she’d resolved to add some new skills to Curie’s impossibly wide repertoire. She could speak half a dozen languages, and she was a scientist in a dozen fields, but she couldn’t shoot a gun without closing her eyes and flinching? Well, she’d _work_ on that. She’d bribe Curie with sweets and her lips, if need be. Call it _positive reinforcement._ She was sure Curie had read Pavlov, but knowing how it worked wouldn’t stop it from _working_ on her.

> 

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As it had turned out, Curie was _impossibly_ hard to train. She’d gotten her to shoot, sure, but it was more than she could do to get her to pull the trigger against a _human_. Curie had a deep-seated belief in _doing no harm_ , and she’d die with it. 

So—like the pragmatic transhuman warfighter that she was—she’d found _workarounds_. Curie wouldn’t kill somebody _immediately_ , but she had no such compunctions about sentencing somebody to death. To butcher a metaphor, she wouldn’t run a man over with a trolley, but she was perfectly fine with pulling the lever to send it over him, just as long as she didn’t have to see the results. It wasn’t an object permanence thing or anything. Curie understood _perfectly_ well what the effects would be, but she just didn’t have a problem with them. And she was _impossibly_ good with technology…

In other words, Curie was the _perfect_ saboteur. That suited her just fine, because it kept her favourite grey-eyed toaster safely out of the enemy line of fire, and it kept Curie out of _her_ line of fire. Curie—as delightful her company was, on the rooftops of Boston—was absolutely _terrible_ to have in a firefight, because she wanted to _watch_ , instead of keeping her damn fool head down, and she liked to _comment_ on the fight, and it was _terribly_ distracting to have a perky French synth chirping insults at your targets, and complaining that her primary purpose was _not_ combat, while you tried to shoot a man through the eye-lenses of his power armour, while his rounds took chunks out of the concrete a few inches from your head. 

And one thing had led to another, and now, she was teaching Curie how to sabotage a mini-nuke so that, rather than arming properly, it’d detonate a few feet after leaving the launcher. It wasn’t hard to do, really—it was just a matter of changing out a few springs and electrical bits, and she’d done it herself many times before—and it was devastatingly effective. Leave one where the enemy would find it, and you’d almost certainly kill the entire squad of soldiers, powered armour or not. If she was lucky, they might even try firing it from a Vertibird, and the blast would claim that too. If she got _really_ lucky, they might even use it to defend their stupid little zeppelin, and end up taking a sizeable chunk out of the damned thing. And the _nice_ thing was, the Brotherhood would have a devil of a time figuring out what happened, since all of the evidence was vaporised. The first couple of incidents were freebies, since they’d be chalked up to user error. After _that_ , the Brotherhood would get paranoid about their ammunition supply, and that would be when the _real_ fun would start. She’d employed the tactic before, in various incarnations: sabotaging combat robots in China, to slaughter whole villages; sabotaging fusion cores in Washington, to burn the enemy inside their armour; sabotaging power cells in the Mojave, to shred the hands of the enemy. 

Sabotaging nuclear weapons was an old trick for her. Two hundred years ago—or thereabouts, but who was counting?—she’d been dropped well behind the Gobi front lines, and she’d been tasked with killing hardened Chinese nuclear artillery units. After a bit of experimentation, and after she’d finished with the artillerymen, it had proved surprisingly simple to tamper with the fuzes for the 152mm nuclear shells and rig a howitzer for remote firing. Though she’d been miles away by the time it went off, she’d still felt the heat prickling her face, and her stealth armour had steamed as the rain boiled off it.  


It had proved so successful she’d been ordered to repeat the trick half a dozen times more. At her request, she’d been recalled to the Y-12 complex, and she’d received specialised training in nuclear weapons architecture. By the end of the course—taught by physicists and material scientists of the finest caliber—she could quite plausibly build her _own_ primitive fission warheads, given the right machine shop. More importantly, she had _more_ than enough knowledge to sabotage Chinese warheads in a thousand different ways, each more catastrophic and less detectable than the last. She’d put all of it to use, during the War—and now, and she’d pass it all on to her _câlin-automate_. 

> 

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And now, the damned robot was poking around the _inside_ of the mininuke while making happy little humming noises, and she had turned to drink. She was already well into the bottle of high-proof swill that Curie used to clean her instruments, and she was feeling warm and fuzzy and in the mood to glare daggers at Curie. Curie—on account of being a damn useless robot—was completely oblivious, staring intently at some little electrical contraption, her eyes obscured by the loupes hanging over them. Blue was also watching, but she eschewed the loupes in favour of her glowing eyes. She’d always been coy about exactly _how_ well she could see, but it was obvious her vision was _very_ good. 

Those eyes flicked up to meet hers, now, and she examined her bottle intently, definitely _not_ staring. Blue always… _spooked_ her, just a little bit. She was only slightly in awe of Blue. She’d gone with her, on several excursions into Boston, and what she’d seen had left her equal parts scared and impressed. She was no slouch in a fight—could certainly hold her own, with her pistol, and she’d had to do so on more than one occasion, after investigative research had gone awry—but Blue was something else entirely. She’d seen take entire groups of super mutants _apart_ , shredding the leaders with her silenced rifle before finishing off the wounded with pistol and knife. Forget the bookshelf covering the hole, Blue could kill anything that came within a mile of it. She could probably just about clear the _city,_ if she wanted to. 

She hadn’t wanted to, though. She had a very specific target, Super Mutants aside. Blue had set her sights on the Brotherhood, and woe betide any scouting patrols who wandered into those sights. She’d gone with Blue once, half-expecting to be reporting on her death. Instead, as the lasers cracked overhead, she’d watched Blue shimmer into nothingness, and then re-emerge behind the enemy. A plasma grenade had broken the squad, and the gauss pistol had broken through the heavy plating of the power armour. Blue had finished off the wounded with a long stiletto made for that purpose, driving it through the air filters on the front of the armoured helmets until arterial blood bubbled from the hole. Later, she’d explained there was no point in wasting ammunition on a downed enemy. She’d slipped a mine under one of the corpses, armed the distress beacon, and then sauntered off.  


Blue was a killing machine, and there was no doubt about it. Truth be told, it sometimes felt like _Curie_ was more human than Blue. At least the damned robot’s eyes were a harmless grey, and they didn’t glow neon blue, and her pupils weren’t covered in tiny holographic targeting icons, or dilated to impossible sizes by pre-war combat drugs. She was graceful, yes, but she wasn’t _inhuman_ in her grace. She glided, but she didn’t _stalk_ like Blue did, and she didn’t watch you while she talked to you like she was trying to find the best way to take you apart. Curie fluctuated between staring at her feet or staring into your eyes, which—while disconcerting—wasn’t _nearly_ as worrisome as the satisfied, predatory gaze that Blue adopted when she wasn’t feeling particularly _anything_. Curie emoted, too—far _too_ much emoting for Piper’s tastes, given how she seemed to jump between despondence and joy at a moment’s notice—but at least you could _read_ her. (Like an open book, written in crayon by an illiterate child.) Blue quietly muffled her emotions, which, while of great benefit to her in poker, made trying to connect with her _really_ painful. You didn’t know how she was _really_ feeling, ‘cause she’d just sit there looking cold and satisfied. 

And there were more things. Curie slept like a _normal_ person, at least. Blue slept in little catnaps of an hour here and there, and then she prowled around in the middle of the night, her footsteps muffled by her cybernetics, and the padded soles of her armour. More than once, she’d scared the hell out of Piper in the morning, stalking past her in the kitchen like a half-visible ghost as Piper was going for the coffee. Her food preferences consisted of _whatever_ , and she genuinely seemed to be almost completely ambivalent to whatever was plunked in front of her.  

Sometimes, she’d hear the quiet _thunks_ of Blue shooting a stump outside, the sound of gunfire muffled by the long silencer on her rifle. Blue had tried using an abandoned piece of powered armour once—and by _abandoned_ , she meant _ripped from the corpse of a Brotherhood soldier—_ but the constant _pong PONG pong_ had driven _everybody_ nuts, Blue included, and the remains of the armour now lived in the shed, where Curie sometimes stole parts from it. Target practice was a rarity, though, because—as Blue had put it—she hardly _needed_ the practice, and good-quality ammo was expensive. Most of the time, her hobbies consisted of tinkering with her armour, cleaning the small arsenal of guns she’d amassed, and watching the rain. Unlike Curie, who generally managed to wear clothes _most_ of the time, Blue was perpetually clad in her stealth armour. Blue claimed it was very comfy—climate-controlled and waterproof and all—but she _refused_ to believe that combat armour was appropriate indoor wear, and she suspected that spending so much time half-invisible couldn’t _possibly_ be good for the psyche.

The languages were also something that drove her nuts. She spoke English and Bostonian, which really _ought_ to qualify as a different language. Curie spoke French and Japanese and Latin and English with such an annoying accent that she wanted to smack her—languages of science and progress, in the old world. Blue spoke Mandarin, and Cantonese, and Mongolian, and Farsi, and Russian, and even a bit of French that she’d picked up in Canada— although Curie claimed her accent was _terrible—_ and the range of languages she could _swear_ in was _astronomical_. She also spoke another language—something that Curie called _octal,_ because of _course_ she spoke it too—and it was nothing more than a garbled snarl of noise that had reportedly been developed for augmented soldiers to efficiently communicate with combat robots on the battlefield. Both of them had implanted radios, of some sort, and they’d lounge around and mutter gibberish at each other from across the house, and it only _mildly_ drove her up the wall. 

 She glanced at the table again, just for a second. Curie was still intent on the bomb, and Blue was lazily watching _her_. Her face flushed hot, and her blood ran cold. Blue was watching _her_? She had that lazy, satisfied look on her face, and she didn’t _think_ there was any reason to worry. It wasn’t like Blue could read minds, after all. Probably. But why watch _her_? She wasn’t even that _interesting_ , compared to the stupid robot and the atomic bomb…

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 Piper might’ve _thought_ she was being stealthy, watching them work, but Piper was about as subtle as the headlines on her newspaper (which were, in turn, about as subtle as a sack of hammers thrown through a plate glass window, assuming that the sack was on fire). 

 She’d never had any particular conflict with newspapers, or the journalists that ran them. A lot of her colleagues _hated_ the press, for publishing leaking secrets and generally making the military look bad. _Her_ work was far outside the realm of sensibility, though, and anybody leaking it would have been laughed at for how silly their stories would have sounded. Besides, she _agreed_ with a lot of what they said. Being in advance of the front lines lent one some _perspective,_ and it didn’t take than many looks at the aftermath of osseophagic bioweaponry to conclude that the war had been prosecuted in an entirely inhumane fashion.

It wasn’t as though the enemy had been any better, though. While the US had committed more than a few war crimes, China had committed a whole _bevy_ of them, and most aimed at its own population. Promising children had been kidnapped and mutilated, in fruitless attempts to replicate _her_ kind. Whole villages had been used as targets for experimental weaponry. Entire regions had been drowned, after the CMC had ordered the dams opened to stymie the American advance. But Canada had been innocent, and the cruelty and injustice of the annexation had sickened her. She’d seen little of it. She’d been deployed almost nonstop ever since the Chinese invasion got serious, and she hadn’t really had the chance to read newspapers. But when she wasn’t deployed, or being experimented on, she’d caught up on what she’d missed, and she hadn’t found it to her linking. The newspapers had done good work, and the pictures they’d broadcast had sparked riots and rebellion, and she could understand why. 

Not that riots and rebellion had _helped_ , of course, but what else could have been done? It certainly wasn’t _her_ domain. Her place was behind the lines, as far as she could get, executing the enemy commanders and destroying their industrial capacity and returning with key intelligence, to bring a swift end to the war. She was classed as a courier, an intelligence-runner, and she was _built_ for it. Using her as part of the occupation force would’ve been a _terrible_ waste. 

In any case—partly because she was separated from reporters by miles of frontline, and partly because they had more pressing concerns— _she_ had never been written about. A few of the more ambitious battlefield reporters had recounted stories told to them by the troops, tall tales of having found the corpses of giant reptilian monsters, and having seen giant men in the distance. As the rumours told it, they were _unnaturally_ giant men, even, supposed cybernetics and steroids and genetic tampering pushing them to ten feet or better, and they were permanently sealed within powered armour that was so integrally linked to their biology it could only be removed through the most experimental of surgeries. They were—or so the stories claimed—experimental assault troops, and careful investigative reporting could point to half a dozen instances of soldiers who had advanced through enemy lines that had been more than just _broken,_ the horrific carnage and splatters of tar-black blood terminating only at the glowing crater of a nuclear self-destruct charge. Most of the reporters had given the rumours short shrift.  The ones who had investigated had ended up dead, which wasn’t at _all_ surprising, given how _dangerous_ an active battlefield could be. After all, everybody knew the Chicoms had agents _everywhere_ , and it was very important to constantly remain vigilant for them. 

Shortly thereafter, Quantico had issued statements regarding the alleged rumours, and praising the recent successes on the grit of the soldiers, and the indomitable American fighting spirit. She’d been only _slightly_ miffed at being overlooked. Some of the shock troops worked themselves into a frothing fury over it, requiring additional chemical and physical restraints to keep them safely contained inside their cells. One had given himself a heart attack from pure rage. 

In _any_ case, she’d always respected the profession. Like her, they faced off against unimaginably tough opponents, but _they_ did it without her transhuman lack of fear. They took on the government itself, and held it to account for the atrocities it committed, the corruption of the corporations, and the carnage of the war, as incompetents like Chase fed drugged madmen into the meat grinder that was Alaska. They were troublemakers—albeit responsible, very careful ones—and she _liked_ troublemakers. 

Piper was _certainly_ a troublemaker, and that was only _one_ of the reasons she liked her. She liked her paper—wanted to support it, even, and she’d already tinkered with Piper’s press a little bit—but she _didn’t_ like the rhetoric. The angry propaganda sparked the fears of the populations aboveground, and _that_ sort of thing never ended well. Scared crowds ended in unpopular citizens hanging from a tree. They ended in the educated being drowned.  Witchunting for synths ended in innocent members of the community burned at the stake, and wasn’t _that_ fitting, with Salem twenty minutes to the north. Piper hadn’t understood the reference, when she made it, and she’d told her not to worry about it. It aggravated her, though. Two hundred of years had made that history lost, to all but her, and to the few other pre-war relics that might still exist somewhere. 

By no means was the Institute a moral organisation, or even a remotely _good_ one. They had been, once, but isolation and time had taken their toll. By the time they tried to re-emerge, they were as much a boogyman as they were now. She understood the fear. Glowing eyes, wrong movements,  unnatural behaviour—the synths were as uncanny as _she_ was, in some ways. The poor response of the surface had not warranted massacres, though, and she suspected the conflict was now intractable. It didn’t really matter. She had a _use_ for them, and they benefited by helping her. She doubted they’d turn against her—when she’d first made contact, a Courser had attacked her, and they’d seen the recordings of how she’d _handled_ it, her transhuman physiology winning out over synthetic precision. That the recordings were from the chip she’d forcibly pulled out of its brain were _also_ compelling evidence against attacking her. If they _did_? Well, she’d blow that bridge when she came to it.   


In a lot of ways, she _agreed_ with Piper. The Institute, as it was now, was dangerous, immoral, anathema to the surface. The problem was, Piper didn’t know any of the history of why nuanced reporting was important, and why spreading the sort of wild-eyed fear that sold so well in Diamond City was a _terribly_ bad idea. She’d seen it first-hand. She’d seen it in China, when the soldiers had been shocked that the Chinese were actually human, and not monsters, and she’d seen it in _Canada,_ of all places, where she’d learned that the Canadians thought that _she_ was a chimeric monster that drank Chinese blood and ate Chinese flesh. At the time, she’d been amused, and she assured them that, while she was indeed a chimeric monster, she didn’t bite. 

Much.

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If she was being honest, Blue _frightened_ her. It wasn’t even for the right reasons, either—not the sort of reasons Blue’s _enemies_ feared her. It wasn’t the terrible, old-world majesty Blue radiated when she took to the field, all the artifice and horror of that long-ago era combining to make something utterly lethal to everything it opposed. It wasn’t even the way she _looked_ at things, with those glowing eyes, and the casual gaze of somebody with two-hundred years of experience in assessing targets and eliminating them in a blur of knives and gunfire. 

It was the little things that scared her. It was how she seemed to have no sense of time—or rather, that her memory was so _good_ that she’d compare things to things she’d seen twenty years ago—or, sometimes, two hundred years ago. It was the way Blue so casually spoke of the horrors of the past, as though her life had been a normal thing.

One day, she’d been padding around the house, and she’d heard Curie and Blue talking. She’d listened through the door, because of _course_ she had, that was what curious reporters _did_. Curie had been asking about biowarfare, and it had sent a shiver down her spine, because the fucking thing would get them _all_ killed fooling around with her vials, if she had her way.  

Curie she _expected_ inhuman nonsense from, because she was pretty much a fleshy robot.What she _hadn’t_ expected was that Blue would humour her. She hadn’t expected that Blue would have an edactic knowledge of _that_ sort of warfare, and she hadn’t expected she would be so _casual_ talking about the brutal effects of Hantavirus-304; the mortality ratios, the onset speed of the disease, the efficacy (or lack thereof) of the antivirals. She’d heard the clink of glass, as Blue took a drink; the creak of the comfy chair as Blue had shifted her unnatural weight, the better to lounge. She’d made a bad pun about the Blue Flu. Curie had laughed, and said something in French. Blue had laughed, and she’d muttered something  about contagion theory in the tone of voice somebody might use to explain something to a small child. 

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It hadn’t helped. They’d waited until her back had been turned— _her,_ their liberator from the _Chinese_ —and they’d tried to shoot her. It ’d been a carefully planned ambush, but it hadn’t worked. She’d had subdermal armour, back then, and the hunting rifle had _pinged_ off it. And then, her blood had been up, autoinjectors pumping the _harsh_ chemicals into the thick hemolymph that had replaced her blood back then, and her visor had slipped down, blinding her to anything but rage and her targets—

In her estimation, panicky, wild-eyed journalism had gotten that entire town killed. Piper’s nonsense probably wouldn’t cause _that_ much carnage, since people didn’t take her paper particularly seriously, but…still, she could imagine some of the smaller settlements going down a particularly dark route. People had always been dumb and panicky, even before the end of the world. _After_ the end? Well, she’d seen a great deal in her travels, and she was _continuously_ surprised at how perverse and horrific sleepy little communities could be. Let them take up Piper’s fear, and twist it a bit, and they’d make the bombs look tame. Hell, they might even make _her_ look tame.  


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And then, Curie proclaimed her success with a cheery _ah-ha!,_ and she beamed as she held up the last screw, and the detonator came apart in her hands, spilling springs and wires everywhere, and she was so happy it was impossible _not_ to share in her enthusiasm, even if you were just happy that her hand hadn’t slipped, and that you were still alive. 

Let her smile. 

Now, she’d have to _reassemble_ it. 


End file.
